The Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism (CCDS) joins with progressive, peace, and socialist movements everywhere in condemning the United States assassination of Iranian General Qassem Soleimani on January 3, 2020. We endorse the statements below by the United States Peace Council and Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). We also support the protest demonstrations against the illegal and immoral US assassination that were held January 4, 2020 all across the United States in over 80 communities with thousands of participants. We wish to express our solidarity with the hundreds of thousands of Iranian and Iraqi citizens who also mobilized against this act of war by the United States.

We condemn this political assassination as one more terrible crime committed by US imperialism and US capital in a generations-long history of attacks on the rights, land, and sovereignty of the peoples of the Middle East in the drive to obtain oil and other resources for US multi-national corporations and the US capitalist system.

We agree with the coalition of peace forces who organized the protest rallies on January 4 that along with the violations of international law and morality that we, in the United States, have a responsibility to organize a large peace and anti-intervention movement to stop US war aims, or this war will “engulf the whole region and could quickly turn into a global conflict of unpredictable scope and potentially the gravest consequences.”

We in CCDS join with our brothers and sisters at home and abroad in demanding:

No War Against Iran

The Elimination of Crippling Economic Sanctions Against Iran.

The Withdrawal of United States Military Forces and Bases, and the End to Arms Transfers in the Region

And a Qualitative Shift From Militarism to Diplomacy in Relations With the World

National Executive Committee
Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism (CCDS)

By David Bacon
The Progressive, December 4, 2019This story was originally published by the Pacific News Service as “Seattle – Something Greater Yet to Come” on December 1, 1999.

Those who marched or stood or sat in the streets of Seattle this week made history, and they knew it. And like the great marches against the Vietnam war, or the first sit-ins in the South in the late 50s, it was not always easy to see just what history was being made, especially for those closest to the events of the time.

Tear gas, rubber bullets and police sweeps, the object of incessant media coverage, are the outward signs of impending change — that the guardians of the social order have grown afraid. And there’s always a little history in that.

Poeina, a young woman sitting in the intersection at the corner of Seventh and Stewart, waiting nervously for the cops to cuff her and take her away in her first arrest, knew the basic achievement she and her friends had already won: “I know we got people to listen, and that we changed their minds.” It was a statement of hope, like the chant that rose Tuesday from streets filled with thousands of demonstrators as the police moved in — “The whole world is watching!”

The Seattle protests put trade on the roadmap of public debate, making WTO a universally recognized set of initials in a matter of hours — what it took a year of debate over NAFTA to accomplish.

SAN FRANCISCO, CA – 26NOVEMBER19 – Workers who prepare food for airlines and their supporters picket Terminal 2 and are arrested with their supporters in a civil disobedience action at San Francisco International Airport. Workers are protesting the failure of the companies who run the flight kitchens to agree on a fair contract with their union, Unitehere Local 2. Low wages force many workers to work an additional job besides their job in the airline food kitchens.

Systemic disaster or shock can open possibilities for social change not available in the US during normal times; the Covid-19 pandemic is such a crisis. The right wing will seek to exploit the situation; what will the Left do? The CCDS discussion will present an overview and examples, with two speakers:

Bill Fletcher — How the Right is using the crisis to advance its agenda.

The presentations will be followed by Q&A and discussion, including suggestions for new ways of online organizing..

the speakers:

Marilyn Albert is a retired Registered Nurse with over 40 years of experience; she worked in the New York City hospitals for most of her career. She has been active in the movement for single payer health care since the 1970s. She is a founding member of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism and lives in Richmond, California.

Bill Fletcher Jr. is a former president of TransAfrica Forum, writer, commentator trade unionist and activist. His books include: The Man Who Fell From the Sky (fiction); Claim No Easy Victories: The Legacy of Amilcar Cabral (co-editor); ‘They’re Bankrupting us’ – And Twenty other myths about unions; and Solidarity Divided: The Crisis in Organized Labor and A New Path Toward Social Justice.

THE TELECONFERENCE will consist of 3 two-hour sessions, each with 45 minutes for Q&A. The first will begin at noon EST, followed by an hour break. A second will be from 3-5pm EST. A final session will take place from 6- 8 pm EST. A headset & webcam, or a smartphone, is recommended

THE 21st CENTURY HAS BROUGHT NEW FORMS OF CAPITALISM – from the globalization of production, to financial speculation, to new kinds of cross-national class formations. Paralleling these changes in the nature of national and global capitalism have been new resistance from Arab Spring, the Occupy Movement, to the Pink Tide in Latin America, to international boycott campaigns, to global worker mobilizations to fight Covid 19. Given the rise of neoliberal globalization, drone warfare, crippling economic blockades, a burgeoning climate crisis, and new forms of rightwing populism organized around racism, sexism and revanchism, it is time for the left to have a serious conversation about twenty-first century imperialism.